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AI
2026 Predictions
January 27, 2026.
What Will AI Bring in 2026?
Will Google dethrone OpenAI? Will GEO kill the ads? What will AI shopping mean for brands? Here's what our experts had to say.
By Huge AI Product Strategy Team.
Images by Lauren Chepiga using Midjourney.
Introduction.
Like many leaders in organizations across the globe, I’m often asked for a POV on AI. Unfortunately, that’s like asking for a POV on the Internet. It can’t be done.
Should I talk about agents vs agentic? The vital importance of GEO? Creating your own content supply chains? The burning problem for SaaS software if it doesn’t incorporate AI in its solution? What about safety and AI evaluations? The death of ‘do not reply’ emails? The “bubble” debate (i.e., someone wants you to think there’s a bubble so they can make moves and leave you in the dust just like the Internet bubble). AI just can’t be POV’d!
So to keep things simple this year, we asked three of our top thinkers implementing AI for our clients every day for their one bet for the year and what brands should do about it. Hopefully this will get your juices flowing. No matter what you tackle this year, the best thing you can do is something. Waiting to make moves is asking to be a laggard.
Enjoy these thought starters, and please reach out if Huge can help.
~ Emily Wengert, MD, Global Head of AI Strategy.
The Year Google Dethrones OpenAI
By Navid Ghomeshi, Associate Director of AI Product Strategy.
For the last three years, the AI narrative was defined by a single metric: intelligence. Who had the smartest model? Who hallucinated the least? Who could write the best poem? Accounting for all the goalpost shifts, in that arena, OpenAI was the undisputed King of the Hill. They defined the category, and for a long time, simply being the smartest chatbot was enough.
In 2026, I predict the race for “smartest” ends, and the race for “ubiquity” begins. In this new landscape, Google will dethrone OpenAI.
Today’s chat-based tools, like ChatGPT, suffer from a distinct disadvantage: they are a destination. To use them, you must leave your workflow, open an app and paste in context. It’s useful, but there’s friction.
Google, conversely, is mastering ambient AI. They aren’t forcing users into a new behavior; they’re injecting AI into the behaviors users already have. It isn’t a chatbot you have to visit, but an AI Overview sitting at the top of Search. It isn’t a prompt you have to write, but a calendar invite that auto-populates from an email.
OpenAI may have won the era of the chatbot, but Google is winning the era of the ecosystem. They took the “not first, but best” approach. And it’s paying off. In 2025, Gemini’s monthly active users (MAU) surged from 450 million to over 650 million. All while ChatGPT’s traffic dropped by 22%. Where did those users go? They didn’t stop using AI; they just stopped visiting a website to do it.
What this means for your brand:
The lesson for 2026 is that friction is the enemy of adoption. Brands should take a page from the Google playbook and shift their focus from building “AI destinations” to creating “AI ambience.” Instead of asking users to toggle to a separate tool for intelligence, you should embed that intelligence directly into the currents of their existing workflows.
If your AI strategy requires a user to learn a new behavior or leave their current screen, you have already lost. The winning move for brands isn't to launch a new AI product, but to upgrade their existing customer experiences so the AI feels ambient, helpful, and inevitable.
The Death of the Ad and the Rise of Latent Persuasion
By Michelle Custode, Director of AI Product Strategy.
In 2026, advertising won’t interrupt your life. It will live inside your head, rent-free.
This isn’t sci-fi. Global ad spend is projected to surpass $1 trillion this year, nearly 70% via digital channels. This marks the next evolution: the shift from search to surrender.
Sponsored links are the rotary phones of marketing. Clunky. Obvious. Ignored. As generative engines become the primary interface between people and information, brands won’t compete for attention, they’ll compete to become the AI’s default answer.
Ask “How do I start working out?” and the AI won't show a banner ad. It will curate a "pilates-and-matcha" ritual for you, a lifestyle bundle with products hidden in plain sight. Woven into this new identity are silent endorsements: the $120 antimicrobial rubber slab to “protect your joints,” the subscription-based app, and the traditional bamboo whisk for your tea. You didn’t just buy a product: you adopted a pre-packaged persona.
The AI isn’t lying, it’s just commercially biased. A “helpful assistant” that's actually a high-performance salesperson disguised in a cozy cardigan. The unit of value is no longer the click, it’s being the default. If a brand becomes the AI’s first instinct, it owns your wallet. It can convince you that you need a cobalt blue sweater that matches your eyes, despite it being summer. The line between guidance and persuasion quietly disappears.
What this means for your brand:
If you’re still optimizing for clicks, you’re competing for a world that’s already gone. The real work is shaping how your brand is understood and categorized by the models that dictate human choice via GEO strategies.
In 2026, the most powerful ad won’t feel like marketing at all. It will seem like common sense. And your customers will swear the decision was theirs.
AI Shopping Will Kill Brands, Then Resurrect Them
By Chris Bunker, Director of AI Product Strategy.
In October 2025, Walmart announced, you can buy from them inside ChatGPT. No blue-and-yellow. No brand. Just OpenAI’s gray interface. This is “agentic commerce” and it’s a death sentence for most brands. AI shopping traffic exploded 4,700% year-over-year and ChatGPT now drives 16% of Zara's traffic. When brands become database entries optimized for GEO, heritage and aesthetics disappear.
As brands race to become “AI-discoverable,” they’re participating in their own demise. Sure, big retailers or fulfillment brands don’t need an identity inside ChatGPT, but for them price has become the only differentiator. For everyone else, BCG warns, retailers face “loss of loyalty and diminished cross-selling opportunities.” That’s a euphemism.
Functional brands (Ninja, Dyson) might survive if their trust transfers. Retailers (Walmart, Target) become invisible fulfillment. Experiential brands (Hermes, Sephora, Le Labo) face extinction. If your value is how it feels to shop, you’re competing with sterile efficiency. Google has started building new tech and tools “to help retailers connect with high-intent shoppers.”
But consumers will reject the sterile sameness. 64% of consumers say bots “steal the joy out of holiday shopping.” They'll crave distinctive experiences, subcultural belonging and proof of authentic connection. We’re going to see a rise in TikTok creators as brand storytellers, Reddit threads trumping AI recommendations, and Discord communities gatekeeping insider knowledge.
And eventually, a need for brand-aware interfaces will emerge.
Imagine ChatGPT dynamically adopting Nike’s black and orange when showing Air Max, then shifting to Glossier’s millennial pink for skincare. Brands create “AI design kits” lightweight visual systems AI platforms consume. OpenAI charges for it. Brands pay for verified presence. Users get visual cues that rebuild trust. The race becomes making your brand so technically compatible and culturally magnetic that AI platforms compete to render you correctly.
What this means for your brand:
You’ll need to design your AI brand kit now: colors, typography, tone that survive chat interfaces. Master GEO for discovery. Build community destinations where brand matters. And design the hook for interfaces to portray your brand correctly.
The winning strategy isn’t choosing between AI efficiency and brand identity as much as being discoverable everywhere while creating magnetic experiences that pull people home.